San Antonio’s public housing authority faces two big and expensive problems: a half-a-billion dollar pile of deferred maintenance costs and a net operating loss of $1 million every month in public housing expenses.
That’s according to Michael Reyes, who took over as CEO and President of Opportunity Home, San Antonio’s housing authority, earlier this year. Reyes, who grew up in San Antonio public housing himself, spoke candidly about the state of public housing in the latest episode of the bigcitysmalltown podcast.
San Antonio has not been spared by the national housing crisis: Half of renters in the city are cost burdened, meaning they’re spending more than 30% of their income on their housing, Reyes said.
“It’s also a crisis of many other things,” he added. “It’s a crisis of uncontrollable urban sprawl. There’s also a crisis of lack of vision of where we want to head in the next decade or two decades. There’s lots of ideas, but concrete plans, we’re still in the process of, as a city, bringing that to fruition.”
Opportunity Home has an annual operating budget of $250 million and 600 employees, providing housing assistance to nearly 50,000 San Antonians and managing a waiting list of over 60,000 people. They have a total residential population of 85,000 people.
In 1937, The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated funding for 6,000 public housing units in San Antonio, Reyes said. That funding has dwindled, but the housing remains with a hefty price tag–half a billion dollars–in deferred maintenance, according to Reyes, who added that the federal government has been trying to get out of the business of public housing for some time now.
Though Opportunity Home faces big challenges, Reyes doesn’t want to do what many other cities have — privatizing public housing and pushing affordable housing residents out.
“Almost half of our 85,000 residents are children,” Reyes said. “I remind our staff all the time, in many ways, we’re a children’s organization. And a good chunk of the other remaining 85,000 are older adults who just want to live in a safe place with dignity and respect. And so these are very vulnerable populations. It has to remain affordable and it has to remain publicly owned.”
Opportunity Home is in the process of creating a 10-year plan leading up to the organization’s 100th anniversary, what Reyes calls the Centennial Vision. For the first time in its 88-year history, the organization will pursue renovations of all 6,000 public housing units at 59 properties across San Antonio.
“So there are two scenarios here,” he said. “Either one, we’re going to lose our public housing stock because it’s going to crumble to the ground, or the organization is financially going to be insolvent and not be able to perform. Those are not two good scenarios. There’s no choice but for the housing authority to find a new path. The new pathway is repositioning, but keeping in mind the public entity part and the public ownership part.”